Richard Flanagan Writing Quotations

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

I think writing should be about change.

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.